Tag Archives: BTM Corporation

My friend Faisal Hoque is a serial entrepreneur, author, and thought leader. His life is a modern story of success, failures, and resiliency – leaving Bangladesh at 17 for the United States where he has since founded businesses including SHADOKA and others. You may know his writing from Fast Company, Huffington Post, Forbes, or BusinessWeek.

Being holistic and humanistic is key to a great life and doing great work.

Connectivityis a sense of journey to the sense of purpose — it is an individual, lonely pursuit and a collective, companionable one at the same time.

Our individual, interpersonal, and organizational working lives all interconnect. By examining these connections, we learn new ways to create, innovate, adapt, and lead.

We need to address our own mental experiences, our social interactions, and the mindset we can take to orient ourselves to this holistic, long-term view.

We need to explore understanding that leads to long-term sustainability, the way to act in a manner that promotes mutual flourishing, and how, crucially, a leader can urge us along this process.

We need to arrange our lives and our organizations in a way that leads to long-term value creation: surveying the subtle and not-so-subtle arts of idea generation, decision-making, and creating continuous value.

The newest problems of the world find solutions in the oldest timeless practices like mindfulness, authenticity, and perseverance—because Everything Connects.

Understanding Unique Motivations

“Somewhere along the way, people become convinced that stasis is safer than movement. Consistency feels comfortable; volatility is frightening.” As a leader, how do you motivate people out of the comfortable?

I think first, we have to appreciate the interior complexity of the people that we work with. Then, we need to make the links between a person’s individual motivations and what our organizations need. In other words, link the individual–personal goals like career trajectories–to the collective group goals like innovation, revenue growth, and impacting the world.

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Leaders need to connect with the emotional intelligence of their people and curate their talent to change, adapt, move forward. There is no substitute for inspiration, curiosity, and passion. -Faisal Hoque

To do this we need to understand what people need from their work in order to do their best work–and how leaders can help arrange that for them. This distinction is rooted in intrinsicversus extrinsic motivation. If people are intrinsically motivated, there is something inside of them that pushes them to their work; if they are extrinsically motivated, something outside of them brings them there. They embrace the unknown, volatility. Leaders need to connect with the emotional intelligence of their people and curate their talent to change, adapt, move forward. There is no substitute for inspiration, curiosity, and passion.

The Benefits of Meditation

You place a lot of value on meditation, calling it the “batting cage for getting familiar with the fastballs and curveballs of our conscious and unconscious habits.” Off the top of your head, what are the top three benefits of meditating?

I’ve enjoyed getting to know Faisal Hoque, CEO of BTM Corporation. His story is the classic success story. He moved to the United States from Bangladesh with nothing and now is regularly cited as a business and technology expert. We discussed his leadership journey, his views on company culture, and his latest book.

Faisal, you’ve had quite the journey. You grew up in Bangladesh and started a business at the age of 14 in order to raise money to move to the United States and study here. What a journey it’s been from that point until now. You’re the founder and CEO of BTM Corporation, you’ve written five management books, you’ve been named as one of the most influential people in technology. Give me a synopsis of your story.

I’d be happy to, Skip. It’s perfect that you use the word “journey” because that’s exactly how I view life – a journey. To date it has been comprised of a series of events as you mentioned, and each has held a valuable purpose in guiding me through every stage. One of my favorite books is The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho. There are many quotes from the books that I think of often, but the following, “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure,” is particularly meaningful to me because regardless of the difficulties I’ve faced, I have never allowed a fear of failing to dissuade me from pursuing my dreams.

Twenty-three years ago, I had just finished my first summer semester at Southern Illinois University Carbondale after arriving from Bangladesh in 1986. I was 17 and a student in the College of Engineering. After paying my tuition for the summer and fall, I had $700.00 left to survive, secure an education and start my life. I didn’t quite realize how tight of a situation I was in.

I met some local students who became good friends. They suggested I introduce myself to the “art and science” of on-campus “janitorial engineering.” So began my expertise in polishing marble floors, cleaning arena bleachers, offices and bathrooms. My friends urged me to request financial assistance going forward. So my “pitching” career began with efforts to set up meetings with the dean, provost and university president.

It is here in the corridors of Carbondale I experienced rejection when I was told “No” to my request for financial help. The provost began by suggesting I should seriously consider going back home, which I would not even consider. After submitting numerous applications, I received a full scholarship to the University of Minnesota in Duluth. I built my first software/hardware product, which was sold commercially by a local company.

Not long after, I accepted an offer from Pitney Bowes, even though it was not in the financial industry where I initially envisioned myself. From Pitney, I moved onto Dun and Bradstreet and then took the step of building my first company, KnowledgeBase.

I was asked to join GE to launch their first B2B e-commerce spin-off as one of their youngest business executives at the age of 24. Ten years after my journey here began, I started my next company, EC Cubed. We launched in December 1996 and immediately signed up GE as a customer. Less than two years later, after raising millions of dollars from venture capitalists (VCs) and securing top-tier customers, I was fired as CEO. It’s a story many entrepreneurs have experienced at the hands of VCs, and a lesson I will never forget.

Not long after, I returned to the drawing board and wrote another book, then prepared for the launch of my next company in December of 1999, BTM Corporation. Fast forward 13 years, four more books, and many Fortune 500 customer transformations, and I count my blessings each day as I continue to pursue my dreams in this ongoing journey.

Our ability to manage business technology has not kept pace with our creation of new technology.

Let me stop for a moment to deﬁne ‘‘business technology’’: the application of technology to deliver a business capability or automate a business operation, in other words, the right technology to meet the business objective. In many organizations there are still two camps–technophiles and technophobes–and if they aren’t at war, they are at the very least wary of each other. In too many organizations, the ‘‘business side’’ comes up with a plan and throws it over the wall to the ‘‘technology side’’ for implementation. Because technology is so embedded in the way things work today, these two sides should have been sitting and planning together from the very beginning.